Re: OT Pronunciation of _Galle_ (was: YAPT)

----- Original Message -----
From: Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>

> On Wednesday, January 5, 2005, at 08:02 , Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
>
> > Paul Bennett wrote:
> >
> >> What's bugging the hell out of me is the BBC news, who
> >> insist on refering to the town I thought was /'g@l`:e/
> >> as /g&li:/
> >
> > On the Swedish news they call it /go:l/, so now I'm utterly
> > confused, since I've always assumed /'g@l:e/ based on the
> > standard way of romanizing Indic words.
>
> I don't know what BBC source Paul means, but on the television BBC
> 1 news
> & on BBC News 24 it has consistently been pronounced like "Gaul",
> even by
> correspondents in the place, whenever I've watched. The Swedish
> /go:l/ is,
>  I guess, based on that.
>
> I suspect that _Galle_ is not a standard romanization of any Indic
> form,but an English spelling of a local name, dating from the days
> of the Raj.
It was BBC Radio 1, and they seem to have stopped it. They're saying /gOl/ now,
more or less. At least, I think it was Radio 1. Come to think of it, it could
as easily have been one of the variously-abled news staff on the local CBS
news.

*Somebody* consistently pronounced it /'g&li:/ for a week or two, and it annoyed me more
than it should have. That's quite good enough for me, though possibly not good
enough for public discourse. *sigh*

Sorry for my even sparser than usual presence, by the way. I have had computer
problems at home, and at work I don't get a lot of chance to keep up with
work-related email (let alone this nonsense).




Paul